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Legal Aid

I am grateful for the Minister’s intervention, and I hope that she will not mind if I pass the correspondence from the firm on to her. It has made a logical, intelligent, sensible case based on a profound knowledge of a needy local community and it does not lightly raise concerns at that level any more than others raise the question of difficult cases simply being forgotten because of the changes and of people with real difficulties ending up leaving the system altogether. I hope that in this short debate the Minister will seriously consider the proposals’ implications for small firms of solicitors who deal with vulnerable groups, particularly linguistic minorities who deal with one solicitor, where clearly the idea of a federation simply will not work. I hope that she will look to their needs and to the needs of the community that suffers, and to the problems that the law centres and the not-for-profit sector are facing. I am a great supporter of law centres; they are a wholly good idea and have opened up a huge area of legal opportunities for people who are otherwise denied them. They are not happy about the proposals. They are having difficulty with funding in many cases and they will have greater difficulty because of the changes. I hope that the Minister recognises our position and that she shares it—that is, that we support legal aid and universal access to justice, but we want to ensure that the proposals do not take us backwards and deny the most vulnerable people justice. Those who come in with carrier bags full of all their letters and correspondence, who often have a real grievance, who are confused and not good at expressing that grievance and who require a lot of time and patience to do so, deserve to be represented just as much as the more articulate groups. I fear that in future they will simply be turned away because the firms will not have the time, the money, or—because the firms do not have the time or the money for training—the expertise or the newly trained solicitors needed to deal with such cases. Can the Minister not look at some of that afresh and listen to the serious and helpful points that have been made to us?